Travel

First draft out an itinerary then check out a site like www.raileurope.com You can plan out your own itinerary. Allow for some wiggle room. Long haul trains should be reserved as you will want a high speed train. Well, unless the train trip is a significant part of the trip itself and you want the ability to hop on/hop off.

Open jaw, or multi-city, is when you fly into, say, Paris, and out of Rome. This usually cost no more than RT to either city and saves you the cost of coming back. Don't use RailEurope for planning train travel. Use the German Rail website. Rail Europe does not have a good selection of trains, only the ones for which they want to sell tickets, and those are only the fastest, most expensive trains. German Rail shows schedules for virtually all the trains in Europe.

Kathie, To begin with, is this your first trip to Europe? If so, I'd highly recommend reading Europe Through The Back Door, as that will answer a lot of your questions. I'd also recommend buying the 2011-editions of the country or city-specific Guidebooks for the places you'll be visiting, as there's an enormous amount of information in the books, including Hotel and restaurant listings, etc. This will not only save money but help to use your touring time most efficiently. Most of the books are now available in E-book format, if you have a compatible reader iPad, Kindle, iPod Touch with Kindle Reader, etc.). These can be downloaded in a few minutes. If you'd prefer a paper copy, you can order from this website or check larger book stores in your area. I definitely agree with the others that using open-jaw flights would be the best route to take. Three weeks is NOT a long time for travel in Europe, and that will give you more touring time and also save the time and cost of returning to Paris. I very much doubt that you'll be able to find a Travel Agent that will be able to arrange the type of trip you're proposing. Using a T.A. will probably be considerably more expensive, as you'll need to pay for their services and they'll likely put you in high-end accommodations. You also likely won't find a T.A. that knows ALL of the areas you want to travel - this website is a much better resource in that regard! If you could provide a list of the cities you want to visit and the tentative number of days in each one, it would be much easier for the group here to offer more specific recommendations. Good luck with your planning!

I suppose you could find a travel agent to assist. BUT you can do it on your own if willing to do the homework. The first thing is to identify the towns, cities, areas that you want to specifically visit. Get books from the library, DVDs, maps, etc. and decided exactly where you want to go. Once you have the cities/town located, then it is very easy to determine the transportation connections. One very early consideration should be the idea of an open jaw ticket into Paris and home from Milan or somewhere in Switzerland so you don't have to back track to Paris.

open jaw ticket?